The humble club has had a surprisingly long career
A stick swung hard may be the simplest weapon ever made, and people have used one since prehistory. Yet the club never really retired. It evolved into the metal mace, became a badge of royal authority, marched onto playing cards and coats of arms, and still hangs from police belts as the baton.
Clubs go by many names, including cudgel, bludgeon, truncheon and nightstick, and most are short enough to swing one-handed, usually carved from wood. Evidence of their use reaches deep into the past: at Nataruk in Turkana, Kenya, researchers describe a clash between bands of hunter-gatherers about 10,000 years ago in which clubs played a part. The military mace is the club's more sophisticated descendant, a metal shaft topped with a spiked, knobbed or flanged head, and ceremonial maces still symbolise government authority.
Nearly every culture developed its own variety. The Romans used the aklys, a club tied to a leather thong so it could be snapped at an opponent and pulled back. Mapuche chiefs in Chile carried a flat stone club, the clava, as a mark of rank. In China the jian, a four-edged straight bar, was designed to break bladed weapons. Romanian peasant fighters wielded a shillelagh-like club called the ghioaga against Ottoman forces, with mentions from the fifteenth century. Medieval European peasants carried the cudgel as both walking staff and defence, and during the English Civil War bands of clubmen rose up against soldiers from both armies who abused local people.
Policing gave the club a second life. Forces traditionally preferred less lethal tools than guns or blades, and until tasers and pepper spray arrived that role fell to wooden truncheons, batons and the Indian lathi. Plainclothes officers favoured short, flexible, weighted versions known as blackjacks, saps or coshes, easy to keep out of sight. Shaolin monks and other religious orders have also used cudgels for defence.
Symbolically the club stands for raw strength. Hercules carries one in mythology, as do the oni of Japanese folklore, and popular culture hands them to cavemen. In European heraldry a club usually signals strength and authority, and clubs form one of the suits in Spanish playing cards and the decks derived from them.
Source: Club (weapon)
